Bring out the vote

With the off-year elections just about a week away, once again there is great gnashing of teeth over trying to get young people to register and vote. First of all I'm not so sure that getting 18 year olds out to vote is such a good idea since most of them these days have no clue about what is going on in politics, what makes a good candidate, or even which of those people on TV they even get to vote for.

However, if we really want to get young people to vote, I have a solution. We need to give each candidate three minutes on TV during prime time to state their positions. Then put the election ballots on TV, and have voters call an 800 number to place their votes. It seems to work for American Idol. Heck, I'll bet more people voted for Carrie Underwood than voted for the President. And Carrie Underwood can't send their asses to get shot in Iraq, Afghanistan, or some other godforesaken hell hole that passes for a country in that part of the world.

The old days of going to an actual place to cast your vote are dead. Young people don't want to be inconvenienced for something as trivial as deciding who will make the laws of the land that affect us all. I'll bet you could even get Simon Cowell to emcee the whole thing for a cool million. Not bad pay for one night's work.

Reducing the teen birthrate

While teen birth rates have declined somewhat over the past few years, there were still nearly 350,000 children born to mothers under the age of 19 in 2004 according to the CDC's National Vital Statistics Report. It is without a doubt a serious problem here in America. But I have a simple solution.

All teenagers, when they reach puberty, should be required to watch their parents having sex. Not just for a little bit, but all the way from the first kiss through to the lying in bed basking in the sweaty afterglow. They should be strapped into chairs in front of the bed, their eyes forced open like in the movie A Clockwork Orange. Being put through this ordeal will assure that the teenagers won't have sex for at least 10 years, thereby greatly reducing the number of teen pregnancies.

Yes, it seems cruel to make the youngsters watch something so disgusting that the parents themselves prefer to keep the lights off rather than catching themselves in the act, but desperate times call for desperate measures.